Category: Personal
(page 1 of 15)

It’s about ten past nine in the morning. I’m asleep in bed. Daylight streams through the curtains and a cat is curled up against my tummy. Somebody shakes me on the shoulder. It is Blokey. I’ve been made redundant, he calmly announces.

We’ve been here before. We will survive it again.

*sigh*

In the meantime, my summer holidays have just begun and he’s under my feet. Humpf. Best laid plans, and all that fandangly jazz.

He’s relatively nonplussed. He wasn’t keen on the work anyway and is worth far more than he was being paid. He’s spent the day updating his CV and posting it on job-sites. He’s already had a call from an agency and may get an interview at the beginning of next week. He’s also already sent his CV and a covering letter off for another position.

It was ridiculously insane, from the first poorly-written essay to the final exam which brought forth tears of frustration. Dialysis, full-time job, a transplant, loss of job, loss of cat, the birth of a Baby Niece, a new job … But he did it. A 2.1 BA (hons) in Business Studies from the Open University. He done good, indeedy.

My Littlest Brother got himself hitched at the weekend, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a lovely ceremony, with joyful hymns and thousands of bridesmaids. My Monster was there and I managed to completely ignore him. I did so well at it that I was able to forget he was even there.

I felt a tad sorry for my Littlest Brother. Two of his siblings from my Monster’s side didn’t come, neither did any cousins from either side, or aunts, uncles and whatnot. Bereft of family. So it’s nice that he’s wangled himself a ready-made family as the blushing bride is the mother of three boys. One does wonder how he will cope; thirty-four years old and moving from the home he shares with his parents into an established family home, where he’ll have to think about other people, and properly pay bills and stuff. He’s not being eased into it. He’s plonking himself smack, bang into the middle and going for it full throttle.

Exciting times ahead.

I am happy for him. I hope it all works out and they do the right thing by having oodles of babies. But I’m dubious. Oh, so dubious.

It ties in with my love of graveyards and cemeteries, the knowledge that hundreds of bones lie beneath my feet in varying stages of decomposition, inevitably all – regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, faith, impairment, etc. – becoming nothing more than dust giving life to nature; the one absolute we all share, after birth, is the fact that each and every one of us will die. There is much joy and happiness to be found at funerals. A celebration of a life well-lived, the love of family and friends, the beautiful memories and the quirky anecdotes. A family united in grief, old and young, close and not-so close, sharing a moment of reflection in honour of the deceased.

My uncle passed away last month, suddenly and unexpectedly, despite his advanced years. Married to my Mumsy’s dearly departed sister and father to my cousins, he was a man I admit I was not close to, and was not particularly fond of. This stemmed, in part, from my own introversion and need for solitude, silence and routine. He was gregarious, blunt, exceedingly opinionated, and – in my childlike observations – very stern. I think that what it boiled down to was a simple personality clash and I didn’t spend enough time with him to get to know and understand him. Plus, he scared the little me completely and utterly, and I don’t think this feeling ever deserted me.

Last week we attended his funeral. It was a beautiful service. I gave hugs and comfort to my littlest nephew and held my Mumsy’s hand. And although I feel sad, I do not grieve for him. Instead I simply grieve for his children and his grandchildren, for Mumsy and for two of my siblings who were also close to him.

It made me wonder – do we really grieve for other people? Or is our grief selfish? Are we purely grieving for the things we want that we now can’t have?

She sits at the desk next to mine. I like her, but I do find her to be a trifle odd.

Having ‘escaped’ an Eastern Bloc country as a young woman, she’s since lived in many different countries. Older than me, married to an English man, she has two grow’d up children and a thousand million billion friends. She talks incessantly about her rich friends with their posh houses. They live all over the world.

Her bestest friend shares my first name. This gives her a reason to like my name, and thus like me. Apparently. I do genuinely like her, but wish she would stop complimenting me. Her personal space values need to get addressed too, but not by me. Confrontation is something I’m more than happy to shy away from.

Sometimes I listen to her and think, ‘You’re lying, duck. Why are you lying?’ but I can’t be sure that she is. Maybe she’s just one of those people who is lonely despite the extensive friend network she’s built up. Or perhaps she really does live in a complete {or semi-} fantasy world.

I’m not even sure that she did whisper, “I want you,” but another bit of my head says, “Um yes, she really, really did!” Maybe it’s just me who’s utterly delusional.

Have you ever had an amazingly profound experience, one which blows your mind? You’re just casually reading something online and suddenly your head says, ‘yep, I know that’s true!’ and tears form at the corners of your eyes?

I had that experience one night this week. I suppose it must be what religious people experience when they finally find God, or some other higher being. It’s a very powerful, incredibly intense feeling whereby your mind is sensationally blown.

At the time I was reading theories about different views on the universe and our place within it. There were two which I felt at ease with, as if I knew all along that it was true in much the same way my Baby Brother’s sexual preferences were something I always knew.

Firstly, we’re just a game. We’re simply Sims following the Fate of whatever our creator has in store for us. ‘God’ – or whomever we believe in {or not} – is just someone playing us on a computer screen. It explains my personal understanding of Fate and its relationship with Free Will, it gives a reason for those little glitches we all experience and an excuse for all those times things which don’t go as planned, the curveballs life throws at us. It also recognises that religious folk may be correct in their belief that there is a god – of some kind – who is all-knowing and all-powerful.

Secondly, and more interestingly for me, is the theory of ‘phenomenalism’. This is the idea that there is no existence without perception, the belief that objects only exist as a phenomenon of consciousness. When you are not aware of something, or interacting with it, it disappears. Poof! Gone. It only exists again when you interact with it again, in whatever form that may take.

And thirdly, what if we’re just brains in a jar. Or, I’m the brain in the jar and I’m ‘dreaming’ this life of mine. None of you reading this exist in reality; you’re all just figments of my overactive imagination playing a role of my choosing.

Maybe it’s a combination of all three, and possibly more. Perhaps I think too much and there is no Truth about our place within the universe. Perhaps I’ll wake up tomorrow.

I am not a mother. This isn’t through choice; it’s just the way life turned out. I still have a few child-bearing years so maybe Fate will bless me with a child one day, but I shan’t hold my breath.

I love my Mummy. She is the world to me. She’s my rock, my role-model, my mentor, my friend, my everything. She’s the one who sticks a plaster on my grazed knee, metaphorically speaking. I love her to the moon and back.

If I never have a baby I will never experience that. Nobody will ever love me to the moon and back. Nobody will run to me when they graze their knee, or their best friend makes them cry. Nobody will make me a homemade card saying, “Best Mummy Ever!” or grill my Yorkshire puddings or pay my nursing home fees. I won’t cry for anybody when they have their first heartbreak or get into uni.

I’ll never be a grandmother.

Mothering Sunday makes me feel inferior. It makes me feel like a failure. I haven’t grown anything in my womb. I haven’t been kicked by my unborn baby. I haven’t cried about not being able to breastfeed or been kept awake all night by a teething baby. When my friends on Facebook start gushing over their day, their *special* day, it makes me feel a little sad. “Oh, look how amazing I am,” they say. “I got this and that and the other thing!”

“Until you’ve had a baby you know nothing, least of all what real unconditional love is,” they say. Ouch. Kick me when I’m feeling down why don’t you. Besides, of course I know what real unconditional love is. I have a Mummy, siblings and nieces and nephews. I have a Husband who has tested my love to its limits. Real unconditional love isn’t limited to a child and its parents.

I think women {and men, let’s not forget those men who aren’t dads} like me should have a *special* day too. I just need to think of a name for it!

Happy Mother’s Day to all the UKian women, and for those who aren’t Mothers, Happy <must think of a name for it/> Day!

I am seriously considering writing my memoirs. It would be mostly for selfish reasons, and I probably wouldn’t even be gutsy enough to get it published, but it would be therapeutic and I do need therapy.

There is stuff in my life which is impossible to blog about, even in a fairly anonymous way. In conversations with YASiL yesterday I confessed that there are bits of my head which the world has never seen. She told me to write a book about it. So I will. I even have a title for it, but telling you that, dear Lone Reader, will create a bond between us which I’m just not ready for.

There have been regular occurrences throughout my childhood, adolescence and adulthood, concerning a variety of people, from friends, to family, to lovers, where I’ve thought to myself “I thought we’d never come back from that one”. More often than not though, we do come back from it, however tragic or horrid or electrifying ‘it’ was.

And life goes on. One day that life will die with me and nobody will ever know the truth. And I do have an insatiable need to tell the truth.